Buses For Everyone!

Yesterday there was an announcement that Ron Sims would be making a big announcement today about transit. And today he made that announcement— higher taxes for more buses.

King County Executive Ron Sims is proposing a sales-tax increase for the November ballot in hopes of buying so many buses that riders won't even need a schedule.

The plan, nicknamed "Transit Now," promises Metro Transit runs between downtown Seattle and West Seattle, Ballard and Aurora Avenue North every 10 minutes, with equally frequent trips from Bellevue to Redmond and along Pacific Highway South.

Sims' office calls it the largest expansion of service in two decades.

And in the P-I:

King County Executive Ron Sims today will propose raising the county's sales tax to pay for sweeping upgrades in Metro bus service, speeding up buses on about three dozen routes and adding service in a corridor that would have been served by the canceled Seattle monorail.

If voters approve, the increase would raise the tax countywide by one-tenth of 1 percentage point. In urban areas of King County, that would result in a jump from 8.8 percent to 8.9 percent. The difference would amount to one penny on a $10 purchase, and Sims' spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik, said it would total about $25 annually for an average household.

Granted, I'm probably not going to notice a penny on every ten dollars, but I question the usefulness of simply increasing the capacity of existing routes. Is the number of buses really the factor that is limiting more people from taking the bus? When I started my new job in Redmond I thought about taking the bus. Just to get from my house to my work—a drive that takes twenty-five minutes—I would have to take one bus all the way down to Bellevue, transfer, then take a second bus from Bellevue to Redmond, over a span of an hour and twenty minutes. Then I have to wait for the ten minute shuttle from the park & ride to my work. When I was commuting from the Northshore area to Monroe I understood why there weren't any bus routes that I could take. But from Northshore to Redmond? What the heck? And Ron Sims wants to jack up my taxes so that people going downtown (where service is already ten times better than the eastside) don't have to have a bus schedule.

Job growth alone in the county is expected to increase 25 percent over the next 10 years and "our transit service growth is not keeping up with that at our current level," said Victor Obeso, Metro's service development director.

So is all this projected job growth going to be people working downtown and living in Ballard or Northgate? I'm no transportation planner, but it seems like I could think of more effective ways to spend $50 million a year.

(Mike Lindblom, Seattle Times, 04.18.2006)
(Larry Lange, Seattle P-I, 04.18.2006)